by Neil Earle
In 2002 Bernard Lewis, dean of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, published his study of the Islamic world titled What Went Wrong? Coming a mere month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011 in the United States, most shoppers in book stores could have thought that Lewis was referring to those stunning events. But he wasn’t. He was thinking of 1683 and the Ottoman Empire.
Lewis’ work was in page proofs when the terrorists struck as he mentions. His real theme was the decline in Islamic world power and influence after the failure of the Islamic Turks to capture Vienna in 1683!
Vienna – in Austria? Yes. The Turkish leaders of the Ottoman Empire got that far West. They had been a threat to the Eastern borders of Europe for centuries, leaving behind a residue of Muslim populations in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo that helped foster bitter strife in the 1990s. In this part of the world history matters! It matters a great deal.
Which is to say that the strife between Islam and the West has been with us for a long long time. The defeat in 1683 saw the contraction of Islamic power as represented by a slowly declining Ottoman Empire headquartered in Constantinople. Decline and defeat can nurture a historic bitterness. That is part of what we saw on the “Arab street” this month in particular – and not just among Arabs. The world’s largest Muslim country is Indonesia and there were protests there as well. History matters. In 1917 the British captured Jerusalem and made promises to both Arabs and Jews about a new homeland that further stirred the pot in tiny Palestine. We still face the implications of this embarrassment today as well.
Indeed, in the Middle East people have perhaps the longest memories – much more than we experience in what a writer once called the United States of Amnesia.
It may be high time to learn a little more about the interaction between East and West and some of the key dates and events. Fortunately a book published by Christian scholar Philip Jenkins in 2008, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – and How It Died makes a good companion piece for Bernard Lewis. Jenkins calls upon us to reconstruct our sense of history (in relation to Christianity and Islam) as well as our sense of geography (page 21). Typically, maps of Christian religious expansion from Jerusalem center on Europe and the Mediterranean with the eastern limit represented by Edessa (Urfa today in south Turkey).
Edessa is north of Aleppo where much fighting has been happening. Jenkins suggests that, “instead of placing a vital early Syrian center like Edessa on the distant eastern fringes of Europe, it makes at least as much sense to locate it at the far west of an Asian map” (page 22). This is because one of Jenkins’ themes is to show the all-but-forgotten Christian expansion east of modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan and into China.
Jenkins also addresses the importance of the contribution to and development of Christianity in Africa, namely the tenacity of the Coptic Church of Egypt. Jenkins is not alone in his assessment of the importance of Middle Eastern, Asian and African Christianity. Andrew Walls states in an article from August 9, 2000 in The Christian Century that, “we can better understand the early church in light of the recent experience of the churches in Africa and Asia.” Furthermore, “African and Asian Christians can vastly illuminate church history.” Jenkins adds that “we can’t understand Christian history without Asia” (page 11).
The Lost History of Christianity traces the history of the Syrian-Mesopotamian churches, their missionary movement, their rise and fall, their on impact on culture (and cultures impact on them) and their contributions to not only Christian religion but especially to Islam. Even though Muslims eventually all but extinguished Christianity in the Middle East, there were times throughout history when long and fruitful periods of “peaceful coexistence” prevailed between Christians and Muslims. They each contributed to the other’s culture, faith and practice.
Jenkins sees this as largely the work of the Nestorians and Jacobites, the Christians of the East, named after two of their leading theologians. Theirs was no mean feat. In their zeal for literacy, in preserving and expanding the words of Jesus and the Apostles, they kept the light of learning alive. Along the way they also helped preserve and translate the cultural inheritance of the Greeks and Romans, passing them on to Islam which in turn conveyed them to Western Europe.
But hold on – we are getting ahead of ourselves. Okay, we can see the impact of a strong missionary movement from modern-day Syria and Iraq (Christians got their name in Antioch) as attested by the Nestorian bishop Timothy in the 800s. Timothy argued that if “Rome drew its authority from Peter, Mesopotamia looked to Christ himself, a descendant of that ancient Sumerian, Abraham (page 14).” Some of Christ’s first apostles went East – Thomas to India for example. “At the end of the eighth century,” says Jenkins, “the patriarch Timothy renewed the church’s eastward drive, to the lands of the Turks and Tibetans, in a golden age of missionary expansion” (page 63). They meant business despite intense persecution. Another group. Maronites (formed in the 400’s), despite a massacre of 10,000 of them in 1860, remain a viable religion in Lebanon to this day.
These Eastern Christians, as distinct from the Eastern Orthodox Church, taught the newly converted desert tribes who forged the Sword of Islam in the 600s and 700s. They passed along the basics of writing, reading and administration. These great Arab conquests across North Africa were only turned back by a French victory at Tours in France in 732. This left a strong Moslem presence in Spain which we can see evidence of today (and to which we return below). Alhambra and Cordoba in Los Angeles today take their names from splendid Muslim mosque in Southern Spain. By 800 the conquering Muslims had reached the borders of India and a great world religion sprang up in what Western missionaries today call the 10-40 window of latitude – the strip of geography running from Morocco to Afghanistan and beyond.
Jenkins thesis is that up until the 1300s the Christians and Muslims typically coexisted although there were bloody exceptions. Eastern Christians, people of the Book, were needed to write and run the civil service. Muslim scholarship quickly caught up. The new city of Baghdad was doing brain surgery in the 800s when Paris was a swamp. In his intriguing work titled Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages, Richard Rubinstein tells this story. Muslim scholars soon gave the world Arabic numerals, algebra, and the astrolabe – the first compass which Muslims in Spain passed on to Portugal’s Henry the Navigator whose sailors pushed along the Atlantic routes.
Archbishop Raymund of Toledo turned his Spanish city into a laboratory of scientific work and translation putting to work Christians, Muslims, Jews, Latins, Greek and Slavs (Rubinstein, page 17). It became a bastion for learning, much of which drifted into Western Europe and produced the Little Renaissance of the 1200s of which Gothic architecture is the hallmark.
On the other side of the Islamic Caliphate (a name for the Muslim empire from the Arab word for “deputies”), in Mesopotamia and Syria, Jenkins shows how learning continued to advance under Christian-Muslim cooperation. The roots were deep – the Syriac Bible of 170 AD was the first translation of a major section of the New Testament into any language (page 87). Missionaries reached the Far East (China) and were possibly the first Christians to view the Pacific well before 550 AD (page 64). These eastern Christians traveled far and wide influencing converts in China, India, Iraq and Kashgar. Learning the tenets of the faith was the main focus for learning in general these first 1000 years or more after Jesus. Similarily, when Islam showed up in the 600s it saw the need for literacy to pass on the teachings of the Koran.
The Holy Books of Christians, Jews and Muslims were always at the center but secular works appeared as well. In the 900s compilers began writing the Arabian Nights which gave us Sinbad and Aladdin and Ali Babba.
Thus there were fruitful periods of interaction and moves towards common ground among Christians and Muslims. Jenkins claims that in the early centuries of Islam there is in its “deepest strata many traces of older Christian (and Jewish) influences” (page 184). Also, “there is no doubt that Eastern Christians were a well-known presence in the Arabian world, and influenced the early development of Islam.” (page 187). This is always good to remember. In Spain, the land of the Three Religions, we read of The Ornament of The World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. This book also came out in 2002 from Yale’s Maria Rose Menocal, researched just before the attack on the Twin Towers.
But history is never static for long. The brilliant civilizations of the Arab Middle Ages buttressed and influenced by Christians and Jews encountered tough headwinds in the 1300s. Here was another century where we could ask, What went wrong? First came the Mongol invasions under Genghis Khan one of whose descendants sacked the famed cultural center of Baghdad in 1258. Ironically, thanks to earlier Nestorian and Eastern Church penetration, many of the Mongol wives were Christians. Jenkins thinks t looked for a while like a nominal Christian presence along the 10-40 window could prevail. But then came the dismal 1300s, the time of the Black Death in Europe and a Little Ice Age of cooler temperatures, poor crops, starvation and disease.
In that century one third of Cairo died, a blow to the Coptic Christians. Islam soon began to assert its earlier influence. By 1517 the Ottoman Turks, staunchly Muslim, had seized Constantinople, occupied Syria, Egypt and Western Arabia and ruled unchallenged until 1917. This in spite of the setback of 1638, even if this date marked the slow steady ebb of Muslim power up till our own day.
The Mongol conquests, the Ottoman absorption of Byzantine lands, the assaults on “the infidel Christians,” the Crusades from Europe which made Mid-east Christians seem like fifth columnists – there were many reasons for the virtual disappearance of the Christian Middle East. Even today the Coptic churches of Egypt exist under sporadic Muslim persecution. We all know it was a Coptic zealot who released the movie that has inflamed passions in this year 2012 and cast a pall over the Arab spring. Yes, from America, land of the hopeful optimists came a seed of contention. Even the Nestorians (established in the 400’s after doctrinal disputes with Rome and Constantinople) had eventually emigrated to the United States and other Western countries, seeking refuge from Muslim attacks against them as late as 1890. Today their Patriarch resides in Chicago.
Perhaps this utterly brief thumbnail sketch will illuminate Bernard Lewis’ question, “What went wrong?’ Perhaps by thinking hard about it, the spirit of Edessa, Toledo and the Arabian Nights will once again encourage people to see at least the possibility of common ground. There is much that is dismal in the record, but the historical reality is it is not entirely hopeless to hope.
With reporting by Mark Stapleton.